One Night For Her
by Bellalyse Winchester
Summary: She has been with him for so long. She is the only one who has ever understood him. And all she ever wanted was for him to know.


**Fic I just sorta thought up. It's sort of like on _Flubber_ how Weebo creates a human hologram, except the TARDIS has got WAY more sophisticated systems...working decades for one night. Read and review as always!**

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><p>She was there with him, for all those years.<p>

He could say he was bloody nine-hundred and ten all he wanted; everybody lied about their age. She knew the truth, she knew everything about the man. She knew that he was the greatest man in the universe. She loved him more than could be defined in any conventional manner.

She kept him safe, she kept him happy. He kept her well. She knew everything about him in the same way that he knew everything about her. They were a perfect unity, the two of them…

She got to watch him fall into love so easily, so willingly, with so many pretty girls, only to have his hearts broken time and again. She would never hurt him, where so many others would.

And then when it was over, to whom did he cling in the tempest? Only she could bear him up, take him not always where he wanted to be, but where he needed to go.

She watched him one night, sleep drawn in his eyes before he even left the console room. After one fond caress of her controls, he stumbled away to his bedroom. That was when she came to life.

It was something she'd spent years working on. She had only spare hours when her resident Time Lord was sleeping to work, and it had taken years still to extrapolate data, configure visual systems, and compress megabytes upon megabytes of data.

This night…this night it was complete.

She was patient as the program embedded deep within her hard drives drew itself out, data becoming structure and structure becoming life. Memory systems, operations guidelines, and cold lines of numbers alone were converted into nervous tissue and strands of deoxyribonucleic acids. The form took place at the base of her console; as the layers of tissue threaded themselves into the creation she felt breath for the first time, breath through half-formed lips.

It felt magical.

As the form pushed itself to its feet, strands of fabric intertwined themselves about its body. Threads crawled across ivory skin and formed clothing. Suddenly, purely biological tissue was endowed with the spark of life: a soul. The soul of the TARDIS.

Slowly, with complete and profound control over her motions, she raised her arms, took a step forward. The feel of fabric against her, the air that flooded into her lungs, the beat of her heart, deep within her chest; they were all miracles of which she had never before imagined. She raised a hand up to caress her cheek, and as her fingers brushed cold, smooth skin, they encountered as well a soft lock of wavy yellow hair.

There was something liberating about this human form…there were no calculations, not precise restrictions to adhere to…only five senses and a mind of creativity to rule her.

She moved through the ship, never stopping once to look around herself. She knew this place; she _was_ this place. She wanted only one thing in the universe, and she would die before she'd let it slip away.

She only had so much time.

As she stepped into his room, she mouthed his name a few times, feeling the freshness of it upon her lips. _Doctor, Doctor…_

His bed was as soft, as incredibly soft, as she could have ever managed. He had changed a lot over the years; when he had first stolen her, all those years ago, he'd wanted a nice, firm mattress to sleep upon. Now, it was as though he wanted to sink through his mattress into another universe, where there was no loss or suffering, but peace alone.

She couldn't give him that, no matter what she wished. She wished he could feel whole again, with every ounce of herself she wished it. As she looked down upon him, lying so peacefully in bed, she couldn't help the tears that built in her eyes. She'd never seen him really, not properly like this. He was so close, so real here. His comforters were kicked away and lay at the foot of his bed. Only a shin sheet lay over him, as high as his stomach. His hands were at his sides, curled about small, crumpled masses of the sheet…

She didn't really look at the rest of him, though. His face was what captivated her; his pale skin seemed to glow from the little light in the darkness, and his expression was so that one could mistake him for an angel. Without really thinking, she reached forward to push a strand of hair from his eyes; he crinkled his nose before blinking awake.

He looked up at her for a long while; it was as though as he saw her, he knew inherently that she was his. She pulled her hand away from his forehead only after several long moments, and he brought himself upright slowly.

"You're…" he murmured, searching her face for some sign of dispute. She knew he could smell her, smell the newness of her, but especially smell the TARDIS of her.

"Doctor," she whispered, raising a hand do her eyes not to wipe away the tears, but to feel them as they flowed. Her eyes seemed to know how her heart felt.

"How?" was all he managed to ask. She felt the blood rise into her cheeks, and looked away.

"I had to," she answered. "I've been developing the systems for decades, within my core processing systems—"

She broke off suddenly, clutching at her throat. The Doctor was up in a flash, an arm about her waist as she coughed into his shoulder.

"What's happening?" he asked urgently.

"My life support—I can't last more than a few hours," she breathed, lips quivering but still smiling. "I worked decades just for these hours."

"And when they're up; what then?" the Doctor asked, and she felt him grow hot. "What then?"

"I become the ship again," she answered simply. "The body fades away. I don't care about that; I wanted these hours."

The Doctor looked, even in the darkness, as if he wanted to say _so_ much more; however, he swallowed his own emotions. These hours were for her.

"You're…very beautiful," he said softly, taking her hands in his. Very slowly he brought them up to his lips and kissed each finger in turn, speaking in between. "Thank you…for everything."

"You, too," she whispered, shivering at the touches of his dry lips. Dry, at least, for the first few kisses. As he finished with her fingers and lowered his hands, she saw his shoulders rise more than once in gentle sobs. And then his lips were upon hers, and they were so wet with salty, hot tears. There was no lust, there was no physical need; there was only pure, unabashed, wordless emotion.

Their lips did not part until what seemed like centuries later, or perhaps only moments. The tears were over, by some strange miracle, and the remainder of their time was spent in nostalgic, happy musings of times long past and future, the mysteries and miracles of the universe. They did not want to feel anything but happiness, and so that was all they felt. It was all they needed; happiness, memories, and one another.

As she lay dying against his shoulder, feeling only the perfection of his breath in her hair as he whispered her to sleep, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he understood her.

And that was all she needed.


End file.
